I'll give it a test then with animation sets enabled. There might be a channel that's overriding the value with a logged value.

Also, was just trying something with the sniper and found that the medic's domination lines seem to have replaced his. Likely my mistake (though not sure how), but funny nonetheless.

Edit: Got it. It's exactly what I expected - a channel logged a single skin value and is then overriding the version in all other locations. I expect that you could change the value, then add an animation set and it'd work, but it's easy enough to do even after adding the animation set. I'll write up a full tutorial in a minute as the explanation is a bit long.

Thank you, it is another step forward for me and for many at this point.

This will also be of use to other people, so listen up! If you don't care about the (short) explanation just follow the navigation prompts two paragraphs down.

When you add an animation set to a player model, it creates a lot of channels. Channels are effectively elements that record a list of time-value pairs, which are frames of animation. They are stored in ChannelsClips, which are the things you are actually looking at when you zoom in on a shot. They constantly copy these values to another element. You can easily add new value pairs to this list, meaning you can manually animate values such as the character skin (ex. toggle uber effects without a medic), the position, or really anything you can see in the Dme editor. Manual animation can be tedious, but it's perfectly possible. This is in fact exactly what the Animation Set Editor is changing - technically an animation set is just a specialized version of all this!

In this case we have a spy model that was added via Create Animation Set. Navigate to clipBin/sequence/subClipTrackGroup/tracks/Film/children/shot/trackGroups/. This is where the track groups are stored - the one you want is channelTrackGroup. Expand it, then tracks/animSetEditorChannels/children. Then expand the name of the animation set (ex. "spy"). Then channels. In here, you'll find EVERY bit of animation data for that model, including some pieces you can't access with the animation set editor. Scroll down to "models\player\spy_skin channel" and expand it. Then expand log\layers\int log\values and there should be one entry. Change it to whatever you want the skin to be.

Want to have easier access to the skin value? Delete the "models\player\spy_skin channel" channel and you should be able to edit the DmeGameModel's skin value again, as it's no longer being overridden. Want to make the skin change during the recording? Right click times->Add Item. Right click values->Add Item. Then just change them accordingly. Note that the times are in tenths of thousandths of seconds - that is, 10000 = 1 second. Why they didn't choose milliseconds I don't know.

Want to animate values that aren't already setup? You'll have to add the channel manually. It's easy, but I'm out of time right now so I'll do a write up later.

Well I'm just sort of guessing. But since it says it's the .dll that's messing it up, something bad happened.

So if you're gonna reinstall it, I'd make a different install, so you can still tinker with the broken one and see if you can find out what changed. It might be something good, it might be nothing. Who knows?

I'll just comment that I get the same dll message sometimes when starting. It's stopped recently, but even when it was appearing SFM continued to work fine, so that may not be the cause of your crashes.

Oh what the hell
I've finished creating my movie earlier today and decided to render it tonight. I launch SFM and see broken spawn door and flaming textures on my characters! Everything was great in the morning :argh:

Oh what the hell
I've finished creating my movie earlier today and decided to render it tonight. I launch SFM and see broken spawn door and flaming textures on my characters! Everything was great in the morning :argh:

If you saved it, and closed SFM, then reopened the project, that's probably why. I've had nothing but issues with saving projects, so I have to do the entire thing without closing SFM whenever I make anything.

This will also be of use to other people, so listen up! If you don't care about the (short) explanation just follow the navigation prompts two paragraphs down.

When you add an animation set to a player model, it creates a lot of channels. Channels are effectively elements that record a list of time-value pairs, which are frames of animation. They are stored in ChannelsClips, which are the things you are actually looking at when you zoom in on a shot. They constantly copy these values to another element. You can easily add new value pairs to this list, meaning you can manually animate values such as the character skin (ex. toggle uber effects without a medic), the position, or really anything you can see in the Dme editor. Manual animation can be tedious, but it's perfectly possible. This is in fact exactly what the Animation Set Editor is changing - technically an animation set is just a specialized version of all this!

In this case we have a spy model that was added via Create Animation Set. Navigate to clipBin/sequence/subClipTrackGroup/tracks/Film/children/shot/trackGroups/. This is where the track groups are stored - the one you want is channelTrackGroup. Expand it, then tracks/animSetEditorChannels/children. Then expand the name of the animation set (ex. "spy"). Then channels. In here, you'll find EVERY bit of animation data for that model, including some pieces you can't access with the animation set editor. Scroll down to "models\player\spy_skin channel" and expand it. Then expand log\layers\int log\values and there should be one entry. Change it to whatever you want the skin to be.

Want to have easier access to the skin value? Delete the "models\player\spy_skin channel" channel and you should be able to edit the DmeGameModel's skin value again, as it's no longer being overridden. Want to make the skin change during the recording? Right click times->Add Item. Right click values->Add Item. Then just change them accordingly. Note that the times are in tenths of thousandths of seconds - that is, 10000 = 1 second. Why they didn't choose milliseconds I don't know.

Want to animate values that aren't already setup? You'll have to add the channel manually. It's easy, but I'm out of time right now so I'll do a write up later.

Thank you, it worked, now I can start some work.

Edited:

I have one more problem - quite major to be honest, every time I get closer with the camera to a model it disappears, when I move the camera backwards it appears again, also it does the same when I turn around with the camera.

Unfortunately I can't help with that one. I've had the exact same problem crop up during my efforts to add hats - model would disappear on certain sides, would always appear if I was far enough away, sometimes would always be visible. I'm still trying to figure it out but am running out of ideas - it seems to only happen with models that are added (manually or via add new animation set) so that's something at least.

I have one more problem - quite major to be honest, every time I get closer with the camera to a model it disappears, when I move the camera backwards it appears again, also it does the same when I turn around with the camera.

My animation skills are terrible :(
Any tips?
I've seen the video already.

If you continue to struggle, i suggest picking up the Animators Survival Guide. Best read on animation ever! Another suggestion would to be to learn to animate in Maya (or 3ds max i guess, but the Maya TF2 models are already rigged!) as you'll get top-notch animation results.

After a long SFM hiatus, I decided to give it a go. This idea was culturing inside my head for 2 weeks before I got around to actually making it work.
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